


skin of our teeth

by futureboy



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Aftermath, Coming Out, Healing, M/M, Past Character Death, Post-Movie, Spoilers, This is basically very self-indulgent 'what Richie did after' fic, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-10
Updated: 2019-09-10
Packaged: 2020-10-14 00:11:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20591429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/futureboy/pseuds/futureboy
Summary: Richie Tozier heads back to California, and he’s not the same.The worst part is that no-one seems to notice.[In the months that follow, Richie does his best to cope, and astonishes himself with theactually okayjob he’s doing of it. Not to mention the rest of the Losers... Inspired by the end of the miniseries, where he ends up working with a man who’s the spit of Eddie Kaspbrak.]





	skin of our teeth

**Author's Note:**

> Miniseries spoiler, I guess: Mike recounts what happens to the losers after they finish off Tim Curry’s It.
> 
> _As of this writing, Richie is still knock-‘em-dead. He’s got a part in a movie. He co-stars with another comic, a guy any of the Lucky Seven could have told you looks, and acts, a lot like Eddie Kaspbrak._
> 
> So I wanted to give him something similar to look forward to… Hope you enjoy.

Richie Tozier heads back to California, and he’s not the same.

The worst part is that no-one seems to notice.

He finishes the final dates lined up for his stand up routine - only three, thank god - and can’t remember delivering a single line. He half-heartedly suggests putting forward some of his own material, and gets shot down by management for the umpteenth time, because _ Richie, man, I love ya, but you’re just not funny like what the people want, yaknow? _

Yeah, he doesn’t feel very funny anymore.

It’s almost a relief when they start lining up voiceover work for him instead. Richie doesn’t feel like being seen, not at the moment and maybe not ever again. It’s like he left his body under the Neibolt house, and now he’s spooking around like Casper the Miserable Asshole. He wishes he _ was _down there, most days.

But on the other days, Richie goes through the motions - a studio, a rehearsal, a moment in the makeup chair and a lifetime of missing pieces ahead of him. He spends evenings drinking things he wouldn’t drink. Sangria for his mixed feelings, gin for the spirits. Hoppy beers and flavoured vodkas and the sickly alcopops he shared with friends when they were seventeen, after all their shared shit went down, but before the worst moments of his life. Trauma’s a bitch, huh?

There’s a goldmine of humour in being miserable. He just can’t figure out how to tap into it, not just yet.

Ben and Bev come to one of his shows. Some dimly lit gig in Chicago, it is, and another where he’s not sure if it went well or not.

“You were great,” is Ben’s verdict, coupled with a big smile.

“Tell that to the critics,” Richie mumbles. He spins a makeup brush between his fingers, half-sat on the vanity unit in his dressing room, and he takes the time to appreciate that no-one else is there but them. “Hey, you two look good together, you really do. How’s the fashion line, Bev? Hanscom, you built your _ senorita _some fancy boutique yet? C’mon, man, this girl deserves the whole damn world--”

They smother him in a hug until he shuts his stupid trap. There’s a lead weight in his lungs and it’s searing through him like a white hot coal, like the acid in _ Alien_.

(He and Eddie had watched that on a battered loan VHS in ‘92. Eddie had yelled himself hoarse - “_why are you making me watch this,_” he’d screeched, “_you’re the worst!! _”

Richie hadn’t had the heart to tell him he could leave any time he liked, or switch off the set, and in all honesty, he hadn’t had the breath either. He’d laughed himself to tears, even when Eddie had punched him so hard in the shoulder that his whole left arm went numb.)

On Monday, he has this interview to go to, and he’s fully expecting another day of bullshit and white backgrounds and uncomfortable chairs. That’s how it goes - a big smile, some contextual jokes, his gentle voice. His hands to himself, unless shaking someone else’s. That kind of thing.

Until he meets the journalist.

“I can’t do this,” he mutters, to no-one in particular, feeling his expression fall out of its carefully constructed arrangement.

The _ goddamn _ journalist. He’s wearing an immaculate polo shirt, layered with a dark and pristine hoodie, and his haircut is the _ same_, it’s the fucking same. There’s not enough saliva on earth to demonstrate how he’s _ so _strongly the spitting image of Eddie Kaspbrak.

He freaks out in a shadowy corner of the set for a few seconds. Just an interview. Not the end of the world. When the camera cutting’s taken into account, he’ll hardly even have to _ look _at the dude, for chrissakes--

“Hi,” says a voice from somewhere behind his shoulder, “I’m Tracey Goodwin, it’s awesome to meet you, Mr. Tozier...”

He forces himself to turn around, squinting into a strained smile: “fuck, kid,” he says, even though Goodwin’s in his late thirties at best and is getting a little wispy around the temples. “It’s _ Richie_. People only call me ‘Mr. Tozier’ when it’s followed by ‘I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to ask you to leave the premises’.”

The journalist smirks. “You’re just as quick as you are on TV,” he says.

Richie muddles through the day. It should be easy - Tracey’s enthusiastic and easily baited and just a _ little _ spiky, but that only makes everything harder, and he’s never been more grateful for the chance to breathe between questions and takes. The only reason he gets through it at all is because of the man’s eyes; not warm, rich brown, but a misty, thin blue-grey.

(_‘Cos they’ve got deadlights in them, _ whispers an uncomfortable voice in the back of his head.)

(_Yeah, but they’re not _ _ his__, _ he thinks back, _ and that’s good enough_.)

There’s an uncomfortable _ beep-beep! _ noise, and Richie’s teeth click together without him meaning to. No-one picks up on his silence - turns out it’s a blood sugar warning, because the journalist has diabetes, of _ course _he fucking does. If not asthma, then something else as dizzying and stifling as a missed first love.

But with a grin, and a hit from a glucose inhaler - not to mention a loud admonishment from someone in the crew, to which Richie says, _ yeah, man, can you just keel over already so we can wrap this up? How fuckin’ inconvenient, am I right _\- they continue.

Saying that, Tracey Goodwin doesn’t touch on love life stuff. It’s unnerving. Their sort always do. These journalism gigs, they’re pre-scripted by a company - this poor motherfucker probably gets as much a say in his work as Richie does. But Tracey doesn’t ask, until Richie _ kind of _ pushes, because some distant part of his gut is saying _ tell him, tell him, quick, before it’s too late! _

(It’s already too late, but y’know… Whatever.)

He steers it towards characterisation, under the convenient guise of a ‘comedic process’. Talking about building up personalities for an audience, “like a girlfriend,” he says, “I haven’t had a girlfriend for twenty years, and it wasn’t particularly great at the time, y’know?”

“Oh, yeah?” says Goodwin, like he really _ does _ know. He leans forwards, ever so slightly, and Richie’s suddenly hit by the gravity of what he’s about to do.

“Yeah,” he agrees. His throat’s starting to close up. He wishes he had an inhaler on him, or that he was allowed to smoke in the building. “One of those things, right? People don’t want to hear about gay loneliness - at least, not yet, they don’t. Because they can’t laugh at it, it’s not relatable. It’s a whole other world. Give ‘em a husband and wife who nag each other, though, and it’s easier to digest, ‘cos people hear it and feel like I’m talking about their lives. _ That’s me, and those are the struggles and problems I’m familiar with_. That’s when you can laugh.”

“I don’t know,” says Goodwin. Behind one of the stage lights illuminating their interview set, there’s an exec who’s pulling some _ incredibly _unimpressed faces. “I think there’s an audience for that sorta laugh.”

“You think?”

“Sure,” he grins, and Richie forgets he’s grieving for all of three beautiful seconds.

* * *

Mike sees him in Florida, on a press tour for a movie he loaned his pipes to. No dressing room this time, unfortunately, so they dip into a shady looking dive bar across town.

“I can’t remember the last time I voluntarily visited a bar,” Richie says.

Mike doesn’t seem surprised.

He’s an archivist, now, a real professional. It’s Richie’s turn not to be surprised. Mike was always good at handling other people’s memories, and now he doesn’t have to have anything to do with Maine.

“The Black Experience records are amazing,” he gushes, “there’s so much beautiful history, man, it’s so different. You know how many recipes I digitise a day?”

“I couldn’t do that, Mikey, not for shit. You know how bad I am at reading my _ own _ handwriting, let alone other people’s-- let alone from, like, a hundred years ago--”

“Yeah, but your handwriting started out shitty and never got better,” Mike grins.

They clink their glasses together. _ Touché, mon ami. _

It’s good to catch up with an old friend. In fact, it’s a luxury Richie’s only just coming to terms with, like the rest of the Losers’ Club. Not to mention the concept of ‘old friends’ at _ all_. Mike mentions travelling through Georgia on business, and paying a lonely-sounding visit to Stan Uris’s grave, and Richie’s scruffy heart pangs with unfamiliar sadness. It’s heavy with history and contradiction.

_ It's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all _ \- was that how it went? Bullshit, all of it. Some stuffy English fuck said it, Richie assumes, and he plans on fertilising his goddamn garden with it.

He forces it down. It won’t ruin his evening.

“I saw your interview,” Mike says, when they’re waiting in a taxi bay at the end of the night. “That _ Gazette _one, what’s it called--”

“Yeah, that one was actually fun. The interviewer was this excitable newbie-lookin’ guy, he was geeking out about all these comedians and routines and-- well, I don’t know how my brain works for shit, but it’s nice to have someone be interested in the mystery of it all.”

Mike smiles. “You know what I mean,” he says kindly. 

“Ah,” says Richie. 

It’s starting to spit with rain. He’s acutely aware of a tipsy fuzziness in his legs, and the fact that Mike isn’t really saying anything further. Waiting, instead, for a reaction.

“Well… yeah,” Richie eventually shrugs. “Figured, uh…. Figured it was time.”

“We’re proud of you,” Mike says.

“Thanks, man.”

It’s not the subject at hand that gets to him - it’s the pronoun, that fucking inclusive instance of _ ‘we’ _ that’s never gonna be complete, not in the way it used to be. He wipes his eyes. Wears glasses less often, these days, if it’s an acceptable day for contacts.

Mike touches his elbow.

“I mean it,” he says, and pulls Richie into a hug.

Richie wants to say something like ‘I know’, but it gets lost in his clogged up throat. He clings, instead. Mike’s jacket is itchy against his face.

It’s just comfort. Something he needs more of.

There’s the unwelcome announcement of a total idiot from across the sidewalk. “You fruits getting a taxi or what?” calls a man from the bar.

Richie takes great pleasure in letting Mike go to deadpan back his own retort. “Do you mind?” he says, with perfect delivery. “We’re in mourning for some dead fuckin’ friends over here. Have some respect, y’_moron_\--”

“Oh,” mumbles the man, suddenly mortified.

Mike cackles all the way back to Richie’s hotel. To his own astonishment, Richie joins in.

Maybe he’s starting to feel better.

* * *

He passes through Canada and does a photoshoot, drowning in imposter-syndrome the whole while. His stupid mouth spins random threads of shitty embroidered embellishment, and something runs alongside the pictures of him, in a thousand dollar suit with scraggly hair, about the kids calling him ‘Bucky Beaver’ in high school.

Bill’s movie comes out. The ending’s _ okay_, and he texts Bill to tell him so - Bill sends back a middle finger emoji and nothing else. Richie sends him and his wife flowers. A screenshot of the exchange is attached on a little notecard.

It’s beyond difficult to make something happen in Georgia, unfortunately. Richie tries to get work in Atlanta, fails miserably, and ends up sending a donation to Stan’s synagogue instead. It’s Purim, ‘tis the season and whatever. Just to make sure, he makes a similar donation to the synagogue in Derry.

Make sure of what? Sentiment, maybe. An apology. His charity is a stand-in for a _ see you soon, pal. _

Back in California, he works and sleeps and tries more new concoctions in the dim light of his living room, except now he tries to fill the spaces with new things. Like, special stuff, the parts that don’t hurt anymore - Wonder Woman just had her seventy-fifth anniversary, for god’s sake, and the comics are even better than he remembers. He listens to tracks from his teenage years on the radio, even though he usually avoids them… Or _ used _to, he realises, with an acidic, sinking horror. Too risky back then, with the looming, monstrous danger of repressed childhood memories.

He watches _ Alien_, alone in the dark, and ends up dozing off on the couch.

He wakes up at an awkward angle. His left arm has gone to sleep.

Pins and needles ain’t never been so fuckin’ miserable, he thinks bitterly, and doesn’t shake them out. The shooting pains stay with him for a good twenty minutes.

* * *

He’s healing. He blames it on the voice work. Who knew audio book shit was so fulfilling? Not Trashmouth, that’s for sure.

Still hard to wear glasses, some days. Even harder to turn out all the lights, even though he knows it doesn’t do shit against anything that matters. But Richie can loiter with management in the flashier dives again, finally, and no-one seems any the wiser.

It’s one of those nights, actually. And he’s sat at the bar, waiting for the bartender to come this way.

“What’s your poison, Tozier?”

Richie glances down. Five foot ten - not nine - but there’s no mistaking the journalist who unknowingly helped him come out to the nation.

“No first names? You wound a man, Tracey,” he says flatly.

“You looked like you needed the help,” Tracey Goodwin bites back, with zero malice, “for a man who’s the center of attention everywhere he goes, you’re doing a real shitty job of ordering your drink.”

It’s been so long since someone was nicely rude to him, if that’s such a thing at all, that Richie splutters. Tracey’s smile is rewarding and contagious. The easy manner of being a lovable shit to another human being isn’t a skill Richie’s lost _ just _ yet, and it’s weird to break it out again after so long. It’s even weirder to have it reciprocated.

But Tracey’s not as harsh as Eddie. And Richie’s not as harsh as the man he used to be. The man he was before his second round in the ring with Derry’s bloodthirsty horseshit. One hit KO, right through the middle of another man’s ribs. Ouch!

Being bitter about it is a step up from feeling terrible literally all the time, he guesses.

“It’s weird,” Tracey says, after a few more drinks and a relocation to one of the booths. “I’ve met a lot of comedians. Seen a lot of stand up. They’re either shy or sad or assholes. Without fail.”

“Which am I?” Richie asks.

The man raises an eyebrow. “Not shy, that’s for sure.”

“Gee, I'm glad we did a video interview. Your feedback’s fucking _ scathing_\--”

“No, like, seriously,” says Tracey. “I’ve met some sad people in my career. You come off like something’s happened to you, and no-one else seems to pick up on it. It’s _ weird_…”

“Yeah,” says Richie hoarsely. There’s five people in the world who know his shit, and they can’t exactly do comfort from an unbiased perspective. Everyone’s got their demons. Richie’s are split between the wet, linked hands of a fractured blood oath.

“Sorry,” says Tracey, like he just remembered his manners. “I didn’t mean to bring something up.”

“No, it’s cool,” Richie says, surprising himself again, because he never thought he’d be okay. And here he is - not there yet, but on the way, somehow. “Where did you grow up? Just out of interest.”

“Hampden. Little town in Maine,” he replies, frowning.

Richie downs the last of his drink in one swig - whiskey on the rocks, tonight, rather than the alcohol-tinged tributes he’s become accustomed to. “Of fucking _ course_. The world and his stinkin’ wife are from fucking Maine these days.”

“But you are, too, right?”

“Sure,” says Richie, “and there’s shit there I’ll never forget for the rest of my life, not for a second time. I’m from a place where no-one gives a rat’s ass about you, unless you’re fucked up in one way or another, and then they’ll take it outta you. I know a lot of good folk from around, but you either get out of Derry by the skin of your teeth, or you don’t get out at all.”

Tracey blinks owlishly - for a second, Richie wonders if he’s going to make a break for it. He knows he sounds like a complete lunatic. But then the man gestures to the bartender for another round, serious lines determinedly setting into his face, and Richie’s hit with a surge of gratitude.

“Explain,” he says, like an interviewer, and not a risk analyst.

“I mean a narrow margin,” Richie says. “A whisker. The breadth of a pube. You run for the hills or you die trying.”

“Shit,” says Tracey. He clears a space for the fresh glasses.

“Sorry. This probably isn’t the light conversation you were after.” He runs a hand down his face, pinching at the bridge of his nose: “I’m not so funny these days. Haven’t been for almost a year.”

“I’m not surprised you feel that way,” Tracey says, “it sounds like you got out just in time. My Maine experience sounds a lot easier than yours. You, man, you’re heavy with grief or something.”

He’s reminded that Tracey Goodman is a reporter _ extremely _abruptly, but there’s something in his gut that says he’d take Richie’s word to the grave. However bar-delivered and shoddy that word may be. “Heavy is the right word,” he says, surprised, “I lost six pounds in a week and didn’t feel a thing.”

The bartender brings over their tray and mixes up the glasses. He accidentally brushes the back of Tracey’s hand trying to switch them over, and curses the way his memory makes it burn. _ Don’t touch the other boys, Richie. _

He’s forty-two. A grown goddamn man, thanks, so that can fuck off for a start.

“Yep… Sounds like grief to me.”

Richie swallows a mouthful of fire in favour of interest. “Who’d you lose?” he asks.

“My brother,” says Tracey. “It was a long time ago, but it sticks to a person all funny.”

Got that right.

He tries to put a lid on it as the man continues: “you know,” he says, not looking up at Richie at all, “he tried to stop a mugging, and it all went south from there. Goddamn idiot boy. You wanna help someone else, sometimes you pay a big price for it.”

“Know the feeling,” Richie says. “One of my best friends lost his brother as a kid, that shit’s the real stuff. I didn’t know for sure ‘til Eddie.”

Tracey makes a face that says, _ brother?_

“Oh, god, no, he was a kid I grew up with,” he snorts. “But we went back, and… Well, like you say, try to help someone and you pay for it. Worth his weight in the forty different kinds of medication he took, that one. Stupid motherfucker spent his whole life worried about his health, and then he took a hit for me.”

He doesn’t know how to explain it to a human being who wasn’t there. How to describe the violence, and the fear, and the sensation of not being in control of the shape of your own body, almost.

But then Richie glances up, and Tracey’s already looking at him. One hand’s curled around his damp glass, and the other’s resting against his chin.

Listening. Waiting.

“There’s reasons I didn’t come out ‘til I was forty,” Richie adds quietly. “Derry was pretty much all of them.”

“But Eddie,” Tracey says, “sounds like he on the good side of a pros and cons list.”

Richie can’t breathe, all of a sudden. “Yeah,” he manages. And then, under the background hum of the bar music and its shitty patrons, he thinks aloud something he’s never vocalised before: “sometimes,” he murmurs, tapping at his sternum, “it feels like it didn’t matter if he got in the way. Like I got _ mine _ ripped outta me anyway. Is that stupid?”

“No,” Tracey says.

Richie thinks maybe he’s got a point about sad people in comedy. He’s spent so long in hysteria, laughing because the fright’s too real, that now it’s all gone, the laughter’s only plugging up his open weeping.

Such a useful way of masking gravity and tragedy, really.

“D’ya think we’re fucked up for talking about death like this?” he snorts, and runs a finger around the rim of his glass. A whiskey-sting settles into a papercut he’s just realising he’s got.

“A little,” Tracey smiles, “but I think you gotta be a little fucked up in _ this _ industry. Any sane person would’ve strangled my camera crew by now.”

It’s a cute joke.

Richie’s smile comes comfortably.

“Guess being a little fucked up gets your love going easier,” Tracey adds.

Which is true. Without 1988 onwards, the Losers’ Club would never have been as tightly tied together as they were. Death had opened the doors and made them cling, and like all things leading back to Derry, it was happening again.

“Oh, well,” Richie says dismissively. Still stuck in the habit of brushing his shit under the rug. “Better to have loved and lost, and all that jazz--”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” he says, taken aback - Tracey’s frowning, like he’s genuinely interested - “y’know, it wouldn’t be a famous saying if people didn’t think it was true… Right?”

“It’s not a saying,” says Tracey. It’s weirdly fucking soft, like, he doesn’t say it as sharply as Eddie would have done - _ it’s not a saying, fucknuts, if you picked up a book once in a while you’d know that_. “It’s, uh, it’s from a poem. Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote it.”

“Oh,” says Richie, feeling stupid.

Tracey shifts, discomforted by his own interjection. “It’s a good poem,” he mumbles, “dude wrote it for his dead best friend. I read it a lot in college.”

“Fucking arts majors,” Richie grins. They always remembered the strangest little tidbits of irrelevant crap.

They sit in shared silence, letting the odd tone of their conversation wash over them, like warped basslines and the braying laughter of drunker parties. Richie loves his best friends to death, but it’s a breath of fresh air to sit with someone who can’t finish his sentences for him, like the seven of them could always do, were always close enough to tap into. And Tracey doesn’t expect him to have an answer for everything - he can’t _ do _ that anymore. He’s not that kind of man. Trashmouth Tozier never left the sewer system under Neibolt, and he’s in a casket of debris, stiff hands clutching a risk analyst who did a piss-poor job.

The Richie of 2017 - sad-sack-o’-shit-Richie, who happens to be the only one who doesn’t find himself amusing, who hasn’t figured out the laughs buried in his situation yet - he _ could _figure out something with a blue-eyed diabetic journalist. Maybe. World’s his fuckin’ lobster, these days.

Tracey lazily holds his drink aloft.

“To running for the hills,” he suggests.

So Richie knocks their legs together under the booth, and lets himself wonder about the future: “to the skin of our teeth,” he says in return, and they smile around glass at each other.

And for the first time in his life, he feels like he doesn’t have to be _ okay, _in order to finally be okay.

**Author's Note:**

> Ta for reading, folks. Comments and kudos, as always, are deeply appreciated. ☺


End file.
